Introduction
This 2022 study by Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks, Pro-Democracy Organizing against Autocracy in the United States: A Strategic Assessment & Recommendations, explores nonviolent resistance strategies that could be relevant for protecting local communities and groups under a hypothetical authoritarian administration. The study delves into the next phase of pro-democracy struggle and recommends a four-pronged strategy that can ensure ongoing, effective pro democratic mobilization even if a nationwide authoritarian transition takes place.
Executive Summary
Many groups in the US are focused on preventing the further rise of authoritarian forces by raising alarms about authoritarian power-grabs in key states; by building financial, legal, and electoral strategies to advocate for democratic practices and outcomes in state and national politics; and by scenario-planning responses to contested election outcomes in 2022 and 2024.
This urgent and important work must continue and intensify in the coming months. This report aims to expand the conversation to also prepare for effective organizing and mobilizing in the aftermath of a nationwide authoritarian transition, should one occur after the 2024 election.
This report proposes nonviolent resistance strategies and support systems that could be relevant for protecting local communities and subjugated groups, and for informing a broad-based prodemocracy struggle under a hypothetical authoritarian administration. We suggest some immediate investments in infrastructure that could support effective pro-democracy organizing and mobilizing, both today and in the event of authoritarian decline or consolidation across all branches of government.
A Strategic Approach for Pro-Democracy Organizing in the US
An effective strategy will:
- Build and maintain a large-scale, multiracial, cross-class, pro-democracy united front that continues to push for structural/institutional reforms and contest for power, even after authoritarianism has appeared to consolidate. The coalition should use ongoing local, county, state, and national elections as flashpoints by which to build a resilient and expansive pro-democracy movement, document election malfeasance, and promote antiauthoritarian platforms, reforms, and talking points for campaigns to take up at all levels
of government. - Protect, hold, and build local and community power through alternative institutions to address urgent communal problems, protect minority rights and lives, reinforce an oppositional pro-democratic culture, develop leadership, and build capacity for collective mobilization when needed.
- Build pressure to induce defections among those loyal to the autocrat or authoritarian alliance, including through widespread economic noncooperation and labor action.
- Prevent, deter, and strengthen resilience to increased threats of state or paramilitary violence through strategic planning and organized and disciplined actions, including building a capacity to anticipate, induce, and exploit defections; broaden inclusive participation; document paramilitary networks; publicize abuses; and demand local accountability.
Elements of the Strategy
1st Element
The first element of the strategy builds on existing efforts to expand and maintain a largescale, multiracial, cross-class, pro-democracy united front that uses scheduled elections as an opportunity to message and engage, organize and mobilize a growing base of participants.
If the US began to careen more precipitously toward authoritarianism at the national level, the country would most likely resemble an electoral autocracy – one in which semi-competitive elections take place to preserve a semblance of legitimacy, but in which other features of democracy, such as rule of law, separation of powers, press freedom, and civil rights, are weak or nonexistent.
Despite institutional rigging, elections remain crucial focal points for mobilizing robust collective action in electoral autocracies and for building healthy alternative (i.e. opposition) parties poised to take power.
Pre-election nonviolent protests in authoritarian regimes are strongly associated with the defeat of authoritarian incumbents and the ushering in of democratic transitions.
2nd Element
A second element of the strategy is to continue building community power through alternative institutions, which can ultimately render authoritarian institutions and forces irrelevant and illegitimate in day-to-day life.
The more opposition groups are able to establish and maintain political autonomy, prevent the local enforcement of unjust laws and policies, and provide services directly to their communities, the more obsolete authoritarian forces will become relative to pro-democratic ones.
Here, the primary work of pro-democratic forces will be to gradually yet decisively build alternative institutions – such as economic cooperatives, fresh food and public health provision, mutual aid, community safety, strike funds, and other forms of cooperation – that dramatically reduce the reach, harm, and pseudo-legitimacy of the authoritarian state.
3rd Element
The third core element of the strategy is to continually divide and pull apart the authoritarian coalition by inducing defections within its pillars of support – this includes corporations, business and economic elites, media, party officials and staff, civil servants, security personnel, cultural influencers, foundations and philanthropists, religious leaders, organized labor, and other elite and local authoritarians.
To do this, pro-democracy forces will require a deep well of nonviolent tactics beyond street protests that can build pressure without increasing risk, especially toward minority populations and targeted groups.
Pro-democracy activists will require timely information regarding the sectors, institutions, and prominent individuals most closely aligned with the autocratic movement, inside information regarding potential wavering of loyalties among key insiders, and information regarding potential overlap in social networks with more neutral and/or pro-democratic forces. This requires, and ultimately goes beyond, effective coalition building.
4th Element
The fourth core element of the strategy requires building and maintaining resilience and momentum even as repression and coercion or violence escalate.
Movements can be more resilient when they find ways to make repressive episodes backfire – that is, when they are able to exploit the moment to demonstrate the autocrat’s weakness or hypocrisy.
This requires rapid publicization of verified claims of violence, anticipation and rejection of the opponent’s attempted cover-up, and a consistent narrative that violence directed at the movement only takes place because the movement is winning.
Bolstering emerging pro-democratic coalitions, developing workable contingency plans, and engaging in widespread popular education regarding the threats of nationwide authoritarianism should continue where these efforts are already underway. However, the organizational infrastructure to develop and implement a nimble strategy in the event of an authoritarian transition does not currently exist in the United States. And, while scenario planning of malign outcomes, such as coups and institutional collapse, has taken place, few coalitions have gamed out potential resistance scenarios.
Thus, we recommend building a united front that can provide the basis for a resilient, nationwide, pro-democracy coalition of local, state, and national left and center-left forces.
The united front should have capacities in communications, education, training, intelligence, community power-building, scenario-planning, conflict resolution, and diplomacy.
Building Infrastructure
In building this infrastructure, urgent investments include:
- Convening at least five cross-cutting, strategic-planning and trust-building intensive summits of grassroots and grasstops groups interested in forming a united front for multiracial, cross-class, feminist democracy defense.
- Developing a multi-pronged communication system to engage, inform, and inspire people from all walks of life to invest in and expand American democracy.
- Building an opposition power map.
- Engaging in extensive scenario and strategy planning among united front members and their constituencies.
- Developing and delivering a large-scale popular education and training apparatus with a shared curriculum.
- Establishing a global network of democracy movements, which builds alliances with prodemocratic movements, organizations, and national leaders abroad.
Democratic Collapse
In the event of a democratic collapse at the national level, the united front must immediately implement key steps toward a rapid and sustainable resistance response. These include:
- Implementing a multi-year strategy to contest, monitor, and mobilize the pro-democratic united front during election windows, beginning in 2025.
- Leveraging labor and social reproductive power on a massive scale.
- Activating a nerve center for coordinating credible communications, collective assessments, and communicating tactical moves, and for responding to disinformation and crackdowns.
- Training, equipping, and deploying volunteers to document and publicize abuses.
- Mobilizing legal assistance and public pressure to secure swift releases from prison.
- Implementing organizational security plans, and preparing to move people and assets to safehouses or, in some cases, abroad.
- Implementing succession plans when leaders are indisposed, compromised, jailed, or killed.
If it is not necessary to deploy the full power of the anti-authoritarian united front, it can demobilize without doing any harm – perhaps having strengthened communities and democracy along the way.
However, if it is needed, investing in the infrastructure to support an antiauthoritarian united front now will help the country and communities to weather the storm of darker days to come.
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